Quotes by Charles Bukowski
(Page 3 of 5)

Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.

The last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti.

Yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut.

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

As the soul wanes, form appears.

It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's -- don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

Nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself.

When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

What? You'd dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication? That's when you need a drink the most.

Human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how -- usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

Nothing's news. it's the same old thing in disguise. only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never. like getting hit by a freight train. makes us realize that all our moaning about long lost girls in gingham dresses is not so important after all.

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.

So be careful when you bend over.

True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking. -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173).

Soon I'll finish this 5th of Puerto Rican rum. in the morning I'll vomit and shower, drive back in, have a sandwich by 1 p.m., be back in my room by 2, stretched on the bed, waiting for the phone to ring, not answering, my holiday is an evasion, mt reasoning is not.

For me
obedience to another is the decay
of self.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

That's the way it ends. The thin edge of the wedge.

I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.

Eating seemed very important.

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

Love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons.

That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble--leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.

Whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey.

You're afraid of the audience, aren't you?
Yes, but it's not stagefright. It's that I'm there as the geek. They like to watch me eat my shit. But it pays the light bill and takes me to the racetrack. I don't have any excuses about why I do it.

I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings.

I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don't want to hear about your troubles.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

So tired you want to quit, then you get more tired, and forget to quit.

Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.

Jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her.

There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.

You boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.

Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.

Waiting
in a life full of little stories
for a death to come.

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

God is a lonely place without steak.

I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do -- mostly with my time.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.

If you let them kill you, they will.

You can't beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it.

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

Nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

Without literature, life is hell.

No concept of danger,
reality, flow or
compassion.
you can feel the despair
escaping from their
machines,
their lives as hopeless and
as numbed as yours.

What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you! Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do? Catch butterflies.

You fall into the mirror,
come through the other
side staring at a lightbulb.

All people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.

And the color in my eyes
has gone back into the sea.

I've been so
down in the mouth
lately
that sometimes when I
bend over to
lace my shoes
there are
three
tongues.

He still couldn't write or
what he wrote didn't
work
because that tremendous
brave optimism
that buoyed everybody up
so well
during the depression
just turned to
sugar water
during
good times.

Meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
no.

We are the sickest of the breed -- as fine museums -- great art --
generations of knowledge -- are all forgotten
as we find profundity in being an
asshole.

There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.

There's nothing unusual about love.

Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted.

and we are in bed together
laughing
and we don't care
about anything.

She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

In this room the hours of love still make shadows.

I write right off the typer. I call it my machinegun. I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

I have no time for things that have no soul.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it.

Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.

One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine.